In a communique published on 22 June, members of the parish of San Antonio de Padúa, Simojovel municipality, denounced that, since 16 June, death-threats have been on the rise against Father Marcelo Pérez, catechists, and members of the Parish Council and Believing People, thus putting at risk their lives and physical and psychological integrity. This increase has presented itself following the arrest of Juan Gómez Domínguez, a former PRI mayor, and two of his accomplices, given that “the PRI leaders from different communities hold the Believing People and Pérez Pérez responsible for these arrests, such that now we have entered a high-risk situation.”

Within these new aggressions, the Simojovel Catholics detail that on 16 June, PRI militants “met at the offices of the National Campesino Confederation, several of them carrying machetes, sticks, and gasoline amphoras. Even at night, they went to buy more gasoline, and during the day it was heard that they would attack the church and remove the priest forcibly to kill him.” Beyond this, on 20 June, “a parish council that has been awarded precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) received strong threats against its person and family, leading them to decide to leave and seek out refuge in another municipality for some days.” Two days later, 10 people “strongly armed harassed the CIRSA offices, being a cooperative created by the Catholic Church, whose board members work in the Church, yet no valuable objects were stolen.” That same day in Bochil, close to Simojovel, four people in a parked car were overheard saying, “We are going to decapitate Father Marcelo from Simojovel. We are just finding the right time to do so, given all the fucked-up things he does.”

It should be recalled that for the past year, the Catholics from Simojovel have through pilgrimages demanded the closure of cantinas and sex-houses, and that the sale of drugs and arms in the zone be curtailed. The result is the death-threats they now confront.

On 26 June was celebrated the International Day of Support for Torture Victims, which this year was focused on the right to rehabilitation. The declarations and denunciations regarding torture have not ceased after the visit to Mexico by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, who in his report stressed that “torture and abuses of the incarcerated on the part of the authorities in Mexico are generalized.” Many cases are not denounced due to fear of revenge, and principally they are the committed by municipal, state, and federal police, as well as ministerial agents and the military. “Torture and abuse take place during the first 24 to 48 hours of the arrest, and generally they end after the person is arraigned: the methods that are used include threats, insults, destruction of belongings, as well as beatings (usually involving hard objects), electrocution, water-boarding, violence, and sexual abuse.” Beyond this, he added that the disparity between the number of denunciations and testimonies received and the number of condemnations is a “worrying sign of impunity.” The Rapporteur declared he had been pressured to keep his report short, leading in turn to the accusation that the report was based on a small number of cases.

On the one hand, the National Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Mexico communicated that from 2001 to May 2015 it received 10,688 complaints regarding torture and other abuses (on average 2 a day). It affirms that in just over two years of the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, it has received 2,119 denunciations, with the military being the most frequently accused force. It also poinst to the fact that the country has lacked a national registry to reflect the totality of the cases of torture and other abuses. The results it has available have been compiled by the CNDH, state human-rights commissions, and the denunciations that have been brought together.

Beyond this, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) declared that despite the fact that thirty years have passed since the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Sanction Torture, this practice persists in the region. Several commissions have expressed their concerns regarding the use of rape as a method of torture against women, the attempt to justify such actions with arguments based on threats to national security or the need to obtain information in investigations, or to prevent attacks. In this way, the IACHR has called on members of the Organization of American States (OAS) to investigate all denunciations of torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Amnesty International also pronounced itself on the question, reporting that 64% of Mexicans fear being subjected to torture after arrest; this places Mexico as the second-highest country with this fear on the global scale. Beyond this, AI adds that 7,000 denunciations of torture have been made in the past 3 years, but only 7 cases sanctioned at the federal level. AI is organizing a graphical campaign against torture.

In observance of the day, a number of denunciations appeared in the media, including the charge that 40% of those arrested for the Ayotzinapa case have been subjected to torture and other abuses during their arrest, or the hunger strike undertaken by eight prisoners from different institutions in Mexico City to demand the cessation of prison abuse. In Chiapas, the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Center for Human Rights (CDHFBC) denounced the torture of a Tzotzil couple as a means of forcing them to incriminate themselves in a murder case. The CDHFBC also organized a projection and conversation regarding torture in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where two experts on the question were present together with Silvia Domínguez, who gave testimony on the case of her brother Gabriel Domínguez, who died in police custody.

Zaira Rodríguez, daughter of Nestora Salgado García, the coordinator of the Communal Police in Olinalá who has been on hunger-strike in the maximum-security prison of Tepic, Nayarit, since 5 May, denounced that her mother is taken to the dining room with the rest of the prisoners at mealtimes as a form of psychological torture. She denounced that the director of the prison falsified a medical report claiming that her mother had been seen by a doctor.

Since 18 May, members of the federal and state governments of Guerrero, as well of Mexico City, agreed to transfer the political prisoner from the federal prison in Nayarit to a facility ruled by common law. This change is due to the precautionary measures awarded to Nestora Salgado by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), as well as to a formal petition from the National Commission Human Rights (CNDH). Regardless, this transfer had been expected in any case.

In parallel terms, on 20 May, Eladio Ávila Pérez, the in-law of Salgado, was murdered in the Tomatlán municipality of Jalisco. Differnet media sources attributed the murder to death-threats that the victim had received due to his activism in favor of Nestora’s release. José Luis Ávila Báez, her husband, noted regardless that “to date my family has seen no evidence that the homicide has to do with the activism in search of the release of my wife Nestora Salgado, or that the Jalisco cartel or any other criminal group are affiliated or responsible for the crime. The causes of my father’s murder are to be determined by the Jalisco State Attorney General, who must investigate and punish the person(s) who perpetrated the act. For this reason, I request that an expeditious and effective investigation be carried out, so that my father’s murder not remain in impunity.”

On 25 May, 20 days after beginning her hunger strike, Nestora Salgado decided to suspend her consumption of liquids to demand that the State Prosecutor Miguel Ángel Godínez Muñoz agree to meet with her lawyer to review the case. News of a possible transfer are presently hoped for.

On 13 and 14 May, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) published two resolutions regarding the observance of four sentences the Court had handed down against the Mexican State (2009 and 2010), in cases related to abuses committed by Army soldiers (including forcible disappearance, torture, and sexual violence). The Court concludes that exist legislation on military tribunals continues without having standardized with international legal expectations.

The Court indicates that the limitations of existing law were demonstrated clearly by the Tlatlaya massacre in Mexico State: “In this case, if it is that the extrajudicial executions continue to be judged in civil courts, the cause will remain fragmented, as the Secretary for National Defense (SEDENA) has retained the military tribunal as appropriate for the judgment of certain crimes committed by soldiers, thus opening the possibility that the evidence be diverted, and that parallel cases may run, coming to different conclusions.” It determined for this reason that “military jurisdiction is not competent for the investigation, judgment, and punishment of those who violate human rights, particularly when either the perpetrator or victim is a soldier.”

For their part, civil legal organizations have requested that the debate on the Military Justice Code be opened during the next congressional session. They have stressed that “both the Committee against Forcible Disappearances and the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatments have recommended that Mexico adopt legal measures to exclude human rights violations committed by soldiers from being considered by military tribunals. Instead, these acts must be investigated and judged by civilian authorities.”

The Tlachinollan Center for Human Rights, which has provided legal counsel for Inés Fernández and Valentina Rosendo, indigenous women who were raped by soldiers in Guerrero in 2002, expressed in a press-release that the Supreme Court for Justice in the Nation (SCJN) has lost all possibility of contributing to the advance of the human rights of indigenous women. Following several sessions, the Court justices rejected the call made by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) in its decision on the case of the two indigenous women in 2010: for the Mexican State to open a profound analysis of matters of gender, ethnicity, and sexual torture.

Tlachinollan wrote that “the project approved by the SCJN lamentably fails to indicate precisely which obligations the courts have in terms of the legal processes initiated against the suspected perpetrators of the crimes committed against Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú, a question that the IACHR had alluded to quite explicitly in its sentencing.” The communique ends: “this resolution is far from the heights represented by the resolution of the case 912/2010, which has to do with Rosendo Radilla, [an activist who was] disappeared by the military in Guerrero in 1974. It is illuminating in terms of the present status of the SCJN.”

On 5 May, Nestora Salgado García, commander of the Communal Police from Olinalá, who has been imprisoned in a federal institution in Tepic, Nayarit, since August 2013, began a hunger strike amidst the lack of progress in her legal case. She expressed that she was prepared to die to demand that this process advance: “I do not believe it is just that I will now have spent two years here, with my legal case arrested. I have never been had the chance to make a broad statement, nor have my accusers ever presented their charges against me. They have done nothing with me. I am losing my life and health.” Her husband, José Luis Ávila Báez, reported that he would sent a report to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to denounce that the precautionary measures which were awarded to Nestora Salgado on 28 January still have not been implemented.

Leonel Rivero Rodríguez, Nestora’s counsel, has pressed the federal government to transfer the prisoner somewhere where she can have her health managed and develop the necessary meetings for her legal case to progress.

Meanwhile, governor Rogelio Ortega Martínez affirmed once again that he has newly requested that the state prosecutor review the case for its nullification. He added that another step could be taken, as the Popular Movement of Guerrero (MPG) had suggested: that is, to say, an amnesty law.

On 26 April, 7 months after the forcible disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, some 400 people installed in Mexico City an “antimonument” to commemorate the fact that this State atrocity continues to go unresolved. After the antimonument was installed, Melitón Ortega, one of the parents of the disappeared students, stressed that seven months have passed during which the relatives of the disappeared have sought justice and truth, but these months have also implied a great deal of pain and frustration. Ortega demanded that the Federal Attorney General’s Office attend to the recommendations of the interdisciplinary group of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to open new lines of investigation in the case, and to analyze the presumed participation of the military and the former governor Ángel Aguirre in the State crime.

On 23 April, Cuitláhuac and Lenin Mondragón attended the tenth Latin American Conference on Critical Jurisprudence “For Memory and Against Forgetting” that was held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Investigations in the Sciences and Humanities at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). They denounced that the murder of Julio César (the only one of the 43 youth whose remains have been found) has not been adequately covered by the Federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR), for the Guerrero state authorities have not carried out a “scientific investigation” to find and punish those responsible. They demanded that the authorities provide justice in the case against the students, punishment of the intellectual and material authors of the crime, compensation of damages to the relatives of the disappeared in accordance with international standards, promises of non-repetition, the opening of new lines of investigation, and a formal recognition of the forcible disappearance of the 43 students, the extrajudicial murder of another six persons, including Julio César, and a recognition that Julio was tortured before his murder.

To demand justice, the defense lawyer Sayuri Herrera announced to SDP News that the family-members would request a summons before the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) to denounce the case, given that, from their view, enough evidence exists to show that Julio César indeed was tortured.